Biological systems emerge from the cooperative interaction of many underlying parts. A large body of past work has defined the identity and activity of many of the underlying parts taken individually, but we are still left with a deep unexplained complexity in understanding how such cellular systems work and evolve as a whole... especially in terms of general principles that transcend the details of individual cell types

We are searching for statistical rules that govern the assembly of functioning cellular systems. Central to our approach is the premise that conservation and co-evolution between different properties of genes can be used to map core, system-independent functional interactions at a genome-wide scale. Our basic strategy is two-fold: (1) to carry out mathematical analyses of co-evolution and conservation across genomes and (2) to test the necessity and sufficiency of this information by the design and experimental characterization of non-trivial cellular systems.